Cycle of Fire
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash, epilogue compliant. Some fires burn without kindling. Oneshot.


**Title: **Cycle of Fire

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Rating: **R/M.

**Pairings: **Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, past Harry/Ginny and Draco/OFC.

**Warnings: DH-compliant, including the epilogue.** Language, sex, and violence.

**Summary: **Some fires burn without kindling.

**Length: **3800 words.

**Notes: **Written for an anonymous request on my one-shot request post: _H/D with an extremely dysfunctional relationship. It doesn't make sense, but it works for them._ This is, accordingly, as dysfunctional as possible, and not very pretty.

Cycle of Fire 

Ginny stared at the plain wooden door for a moment, then sighed. What was she doing? No matter how long she waited, things would never go back to normal. So she might as well face what was coming like the brave woman she'd always thought of herself as.

She put a hand on the door, about to push it open, and then froze as a sizzling spell burned through the wood, a few inches from her fingers. Shouting immediately exploded from inside the room. Ginny backed up a cautious step and drew her wand.

The voices and the words were distinguishable now. One speaker was Harry, of course, and the other was Draco Malfoy, the man Harry supposedly loved and was divorcing Ginny to spend the rest of his life with. Ginny's brow furrowed as she listened.

"—never talk about my friends that way again!"

"Oh, come off it, Potter, you _know_ it's true. And you know _why_ my feelings haven't changed. The Dark Lord was wrong, but only in his methods, not his ideas. Mudbloods _still—_"

"Don't _say_ that word—"

"I'll say whatever I like, and if you don't want me to you'd better give my mouth something better to do instead—"

Harry's voice intoned a Blasting Curse, and Ginny heard the heavy impact of a body with the far wall. A moment later, Harry grunted in pain, though Malfoy's spell must have been noverbal, since Ginny hadn't heard an incantation.

Ginny nudged the door open.

Harry and Malfoy had arranged to meet her and the solicitor in this calm, quiet office where Malfoy passed most of his days doing things involving impressive amounts of numbers—and Galleons, mustn't forget that, Ginny thought, thinking of the many ways he had insulted her family's poverty in public during the years when she hadn't known he and Harry were shagging each other. There had been a venerable oak desk standing upright near the center of the room when Ginny had seen it last week, and the shelves along the wall held scrolls, ledgers, and books impeccably arranged by date and name of author.

The shelves were smashed apart now, sagging and dribbling their contents like broken bowls of water. From the amount of small, powdery shreds that Ginny's feet crushed, most of the documents hadn't survived the fight intact, either. The desk itself was cut neatly in half, and Harry was sprawled on top of it, nursing a long gash in his leg. Ginny tensed as she stared at it, estimating the distance to his femoral artery, but realized he must already have cast a partial healing spell; the skin knit together as she watched.

She turned to look at Malfoy, who was staggering slowly back to his feet on the opposite side of the room. His robes were torn, and Ginny could make out the blossom of dark purple bruises along his chest. His gaze at Harry was direct and passionate, full of fury, hatred—

And lust.

Ginny shut her eyes and swallowed. The sick, vertiginous feeling that had attacked her head when Harry first told her he'd been sleeping with Draco Malfoy and wanted a divorce returned, but this time she thought she might vomit over the expression on the face of her husband's "lover."

She opened one eye and dared a quick look at Harry. He was staring at Malfoy with the same exact expression, making allowances for the different colors of his skin and eyes.

And that was the moment, as Ginny realized later, when she was really free. Her love for Harry had been extremely stubborn throughout everything, but _that_ was the death blow—realizing she'd shared her bed for twenty years with someone who could fuck someone he hated.

She'd agonized over what had gone wrong, over what she was missing that Harry had found in Malfoy. Now she realized it wasn't her fault at all. The defect was in Harry, not her. If he wanted oily passion and kisses that tasted of the gutter, he was perfectly welcome to them. Ginny wanted sweet, gentle lovemaking, and she wouldn't change her preferences just because her husband was a freak.

She pulled out the papers she'd carried safe in an inner pocket of her robes and scrawled her signature in the three places that still required it. She had planned to talk matters over with the solicitor, adjusting the terms she and Harry had negotiated, and maybe try one more plea to convince her husband to come back to her.

But there was no need for that—no need for anything but to be as far from Harry as possible.

"It's done," she said to Harry, and sent the papers flying at him with a violent swish of her wand. Harry scrambled to catch them, gaping at her. The hard look had left his eyes, and they held something of the old tenderness she had seen in them the nights they conceived their children.

And Ginny understood, then. Harry was at home to both kinds of passion, not just one. But he'd chosen to go with this in the end. He'd had the choice of a healthy relationship and an unhealthy one, and he'd picked the unhealthy one without looking back.

No, it was nothing she had done.

"Ginny—" Harry began.

Ginny turned her back and walked out of the office. Her head was tingling and her hands were shaking.

The air tasted sweeter when she breathed it.

* * *

Al talked on and on about reconciliation and how they had to understand their father's choices, how he obviously hadn't been happy with Mum or he would have stayed with her, how he had probably suffered torments concealing his _real_ sexual orientation from his children. And so on, and so on. It was the same kind of sentimental, sugary-sweet rubbish that Al always talked.

James had decided he didn't have to listen. What he _did_ want to do was make his father and Malfoy pay for hurting Mum. He was eighteen years old now, and out of Hogwarts, with the Trace off his wand. He could do that.

He was very careful. He secured the Invisibility Cloak before he left. He spent three days studying the Darkest book of hexes he could find in his friend Sybil Corner's house, until he knew them all by heart—hexes that would make Malfoy's balls shrivel and swell up, curses that would make his father's dick drop off. He worked out the Apparition coordinates for Malfoy Manor a _week_ in advance, to be sure that he wouldn't arrive inside the wards and to scan their defenses.

Those defenses were pitiful, really. Did the Malfoys really think no one would come after them now the war was over? James snorted to himself and cast the countercharms that would noiselessly remove the spells to detect intruders on a small, neglected part of the large wall surrounding the estate. Then there came a spell to turn the stone to water—one so rare that most wizarding families who wanted to protect their homes didn't bother to guard against it—and he slipped through the weakened section that he created. He pulled green branches of some bush growing against the wall together, and the hole was covered completely. No one would find it in the time it would take him to sneak up to the house, find his traitorous father and Mr. Malfoy together, and hex them, not even the nosiest house-elf.

James could feel the pulse of righteous vengeance traveling through him as he stalked towards the house, always being careful that no trace of his robes or boots showed from under the Invisibility Cloak. No one would expect him. His father still thought of him as a child. Mr. Malfoy sneered at him whenever they met, no doubt fortified by his son Scorpius's contemptuous reports that James Potter just wasted his magic on harmless pranks and jinxes.

_Not anymore. I'm an adult now, not a boy._

He whispered, "_Point Me _Harry Potter," to his wand, and it spun and guided him towards a ground floor window. James chuckled to himself. _Excellent._ He had been prepared to climb to the first or second floor if he had to, but this was even better. He could hex them through the window and be off again with no one the wiser.

He crept up to the window and put his eye to the glass pane.

Unfortunately, from this angle he could see nothing but Malfoy's head thrown back, his mouth gaping, distended. Disgusted, James wondered if he'd eaten too much for dinner and fallen asleep, but just to be sure, he pulled a mirror out of his pocket and whispered an incantation over it that would let him see through the wall and into the room at different angles. That done, he held the mirror out and to the right, keeping a careful eye on the reflection.

Blurred dark images swung past him, black hair against pale flesh, the bright blue carpet—

_Wait!_

James maneuvered the mirror back again, and made out his father on his knees, sucking Draco Malfoy's cock.

James stared. A heavy weight settled in his stomach and rolled over. The mirror shook in his hand. He tried to steady it, but that just made it shake more, and he nearly lost the reflection.

He had never—expected—to see anything like this. The sheer strangeness of it held him fascinated.

His father's eyes were closed and his face was twisted up in _pain._ Malfoy's hips were pounding forwards, now and then obscuring the sight of Harry altogether; if it weren't for the mirror, which allowed him a wider field of vision than normal, James wouldn't have been sure it _was_ Harry. Malfoy's hands were buried in his father's hair, scratching and raking. When they flailed up for a moment, fingers spreading in what seemed to be surprise, James made out skin and blood under the nails, and curls of hair around the knuckles, where Malfoy had tugged it out.

"Fuck, _take_ it," Malfoy cried, loudly enough to pierce through whatever sound-muffling spells might be on the house. His neck arched again, and his hips pushed up until James could hear his father gagging. Maybe no sound-proofing spells at all, then, James thought, and swallowed. The weight turned over in his stomach again.

"_Take_ it, Potter," Malfoy said, regular as an incantation, and then stilled. His whole body contorted as he came. James knew that must be what was happening, although he could see Malfoy's lower body better than he could see his cock. His cock was stuffed into his father's face, pointing down his throat. And Harry's throat was pulsing as he swallowed.

James looked away for a long moment, and then leaned his cheek on the window. His face was hot.

He turned back again to find his father settling onto his haunches. The corners of his mouth were white, the way James had seen them when Harry ate a pasty from the bakery in Hogsmeade too fast and smeared his face with cream or butter. James shut his eyes, shuddering.

He could still hear his father's voice say, "Well, how was _that_?"

Malfoy's voice, incredibly composed, said, "Deborah sucked cock better."

James flinched. He knew Malfoy must mean his wife, Scorpius's mother, whom Malfoy had divorced not long after Scorpius's first year at Hogwarts. Sometimes Al talked on and on about her, too.

Harry snarled. "Not well enough for you to keep her around, did she?"

"I took you for your arse, Potter, not your throat."

James heard the chair crash over a moment later. He glanced into the mirror to see his father writhing about on top of Malfoy, grinding down with sharp, jagged movements, his teeth buried in Malfoy's throat.

James fled. He had envisioned disrupting the joy and contentment that his father had been enough of a bastard to find outside marriage with his well-placed hexes. He had not expected what he found. It was too strange. The expression on his father's face was too much like pain.

Later, he told himself that his spells would have made no difference anyway. It looked as though Harry was being punished enough.

* * *

Lily had known how it would be. She had dreamed it all up in her mind: a great, secret romance, hidden for nearly two decades, finally breaking into the open like a flower when the partners involved couldn't hide it any longer. Mr. Malfoy had divorced his wife when he couldn't take deception anymore, but her father had tried to be her mother's hero just a little while longer. It hadn't worked. Of _course_ it hadn't worked. Love was meant to conquer all.

It helped that Lily was going through one of the "rough patches" wherein she didn't particularly care for her mother. The last three letters she'd sent to Ginny from Hogwarts had all resulted in Howlers.

Her romance smashed like shattered glass when Al told her, in confidence, that their father had left Mr. Malfoy. Lily gasped and nearly choked on the scone she was eating. Al pounded her back enthusiastically, causing two or three other nearby Gryffindors to look up.

"But _why_?" Lily whispered, when she was certain she had her voice under control and wouldn't wail her desolation to the skies.

Scorpius leaned over Al's shoulder to whisper. Since this was his seventh year in Gryffindor, the mutters and the stares and the headshakes over a Malfoy in a red-and-gold tie had subsided, mostly. "Because they were fighting too much, my father said." He shrugged a little. "He said he broke _your_ father's leg."

Lily shuddered. There _had_ to be some mistake. Her father was supposed to be _happy._ Lily knew her mother was more grimly determined to act happy at the moment than she was really happy, but that was what her mother deserved, for not _understanding_ anything.

She made her grand plan then, by "innocently" asking Al the address of their father's new flat, and, come next Hogsmeade weekend, sneaking down to the village and Apparating from there. She wasn't supposed to be able to Apparate, but Scorpius had shown her how already. He had told her solemnly only to use her newfound powers for good causes. Lily was sure this was one of them.

She got a few stares as she walked through the crowded section of wizarding London to her father's door, but she put her chin up and strode determinedly onwards, feigning the composed air of a proud pure-blood witch. That was another useful lesson Scorpius had taught her: look as though you had urgent business in one direction, and people were more likely to assume you belonged.

Soon she had ascended the steps to a small door on the third floor and was lifting a greenish copper knocker. The sight of the building her Dad had chosen to live in—gray as ashes, set an uncomfortable distance back from the street, dingy and uninspiring—shook her conceptions of romance a little bit, but only a little. In surroundings like these, flowery speeches and tender lovemaking would be the more keenly appreciated, because beauty was so rare.

No one answered the door. Lily rapped the knocker again and then cast the Clapping Charm, which was considerably louder.

"Dad?" she called.

After long moments, the door finally opened. Her father was behind it, sitting awkwardly in a wheelchair. A white cast covered his leg. Lily stared at him with an open mouth, and then slowly raised a hand to cover it.

"Daddy, what happened?" she whispered.

"Lily?" Her father squinted at her. She must have got him out of bed; his hair was mussed and his glasses missing. But why would he be in bed in the middle of the afternoon? "What are you doing here?"

"I wanted to come see you," she said. She glanced around once, and then slipped through the door with a dexterity born of long practice. There were too many people who might know Harry Potter was living here, and they would want to take photographs and pester him with questions if given a chance, the way they'd tried to do when Lily was still just a kid. "And see how you are," she added, turning around to face him, noting uneasily the presence of thick stubble on his face and scabs covering his throat. "What happened? Why did you leave Mr. Malfoy?"

Harry laughed. Lily shrank backwards. Sometimes she'd heard monsters in her dreams; they laughed like that.

"Because he tried to kill me," her father said, and motioned to his cast. "He cast a charm that keeps breaking the bones in my leg, no matter what spells the Healers try. So my leg has to mend the Muggle way. And he tried to strangle me." His fingers rose and brushed over the scabs on his throat.

Staring, horrified, Lily felt her eyes fill with tears. She shook her head several times, but it was a long moment before she could force the words from her throat. "But you _love_ him. And he loves you."

"Not really, no," her father said, staring at the far wall. "It's something that burns between us, flaring up and consuming us while it lasts, but then dying down again. We went months without touching each other, sometimes. Then I'd see him in Diagon Alley or the Ministry and I'd have to have him again. I can remember fucking him when he begged me not to, when he hadn't divorced Deborah yet or when Scorpius was in the next room. It was like wildfire then. And then it burned down to embers again, and we were only left with the hatred." He looked at Lily. "It's cinders now, the lowest it's ever gone."

Lily swallowed. She wanted to bear up under it, be an adult and not a child the way Jamie always told her she should be, but her romance had cracked straight down the middle, and she had no idea how to salvage it. "But why did you leave Mum for him, if you aren't _happy_?"

Harry laughed that horrible laugh again. "Because the fire finally ate up the love I had for your mother," he said. "I told you, it's a wildfire. It'll probably light again, in a few months." His hand idly traced over the cast.

"I hope you never feel anything like this, Lils," he whispered. "This mixture of lust and hatred, this _heat_. All the romances I've ever read or heard about compare love to fire, but they wouldn't do that if they knew what fire really was. Have you ever seen what fire does to plants and the land? Do you know how long the earth can take to regenerate?"

Lily couldn't take it anymore. She fled. She somehow Apparated back to Hogwarts without Splinching herself, though she never knew how; the next memory she really had was of running up the road to the castle in tears.

She spent the rest of the afternoon writing a long letter home. With the beauty of the world dying around her, she really needed her mother.

* * *

Ron saw it start again.

He had invited Harry to a small party held at their house the day before Christmas Eve—or rather, _Hermione_ had invited Harry. Ron was perfectly willing to meet Harry at a pub for drinks, or at his rented flat for a quiet talk, now that it had been a year-and-a-half since he and Ginny divorced and a year since Harry had dated Malfoy. Harry still wasn't welcome at the Burrow, but Ron knew even his Mum's hurt might thaw by next year. She missed Harry.

Everything was going along slowly, normally; Time was healing the wounds. So _of course_ Hermione had to invite Harry to a party where Bill, Fleur, their daughter Victoire, Teddy Lupin, George, his wife Angelina Johnson, and their two boys, and Percy would _also_ be. Ginny wasn't there, thank God, and neither were Harry's children. But having Harry suddenly reintroduced to the company of his former brothers-in-law could have been disastrous. That Percy was the only one to sneer and avoid him was a miracle Ron darkly suspected he would end up paying for somehow in the New Year.

Ron had to give his wife some credit, though. Not even _she_ would have been so mad as to invite Malfoy. No, Malfoy wrestled his way through the wards on the Floo connection and stumbled out of the hearth in the middle of Harry's cautiously spirited debate with George and Ron about Quidditch. Everyone turned to stare at him as he coughed ostentatiously and brushed soot from his robes.

Harry's head turned last. From the stunned widening of his green eyes, Ron at least knew _he_ hadn't expected Malfoy's presence here, either. And Malfoy straightened and stared in several directions with a haughty smirk before he located Harry, which suggested he hadn't spied through the windows first.

Ron saw the air between them _ignite._

He could never explain it better than that afterwards, even when Hermione demanded an explanation (since she'd been out of the room gathering up more drinks at the time). Harry and Malfoy's eyes connected, and the hunger swept over both their faces like devouring flames. There was no hesitancy in his best friend, as Ron would have expected there to be after Malfoy had almost killed him—and Ron could read his best friend well, thank you very much. Harry strode across the room, though he limped slightly, and met Malfoy in the middle. His arms went around Malfoy's waist and he bent him over with the force of his kiss. Malfoy gabbled out a satisfied snarl and tangled his fingers into Harry's hair, yanking and ripping.

Everyone was staring, silent. Ron _did_ see Percy's face frozen in the middle of a complaint, but he couldn't seem to voice it. Like everyone else, he watched passion grow like an inferno in front of them, and wondered what the consequences would be.

The consequences were simple, at least for that evening. A _crack_ came, and Harry and Malfoy Apparated out, right in the middle of the kiss.

In the aftermath, Ron saw Hermione standing in the doorway to the kitchen, blinking. His brothers stirred and stared at one another. Victoire leaned against Teddy, who put his arm around her. Fleur had a hand over her mouth, her eyes shadowed, her face thoughtful.

Ron slowly sipped his Firewhiskey. He suspected—no, he _knew_—that Harry would tell him he'd got back together with Malfoy tomorrow. If Ron even saw Harry tomorrow, and Malfoy didn't keep him in bed for three days straight.

Ron also knew he would never understand what burned between Harry and Malfoy.

And Merlin, he was glad of that.


End file.
